Archangel opens on a haunting image set in 1919, when Canadian forces briefly intervene in the waning days of the Russian Civil War. A one‑legged Canadian officer, Lt. John Boles, stands on the rail of a steamship, cradling the ashes of his vanished lover, Iris. In a cruel twist of fate, an officer mistakes Iris’ urn for a bottle of liquor and hurls it overboard. A narrator then steps in to weave a meditation on love—its redeeming power and its dangerous cousin, self‑love or pride—that can become the seedbed of war. (A cameo by Maddin’s daughter Jilian appears as a young Cossack girl who orders the execution of a boy, adding a fateful note of fate and myth to the moment.)
When Boles lands in Archangel, he takes shelter with a local family that includes a brave son, Geza; a cowardly father, Jannings; and a mother, Danchuk, who instantly takes a shine to him, while a kindly grandmother, simply called “Baba,” watches over a nameless baby. Geza, struck by a seizure as Boles arrives, is tended with old‑fashioned remedies—scrubbing the torso with horsehair brushes and even being told to eat horsehair to expel worms—while Boles dismisses Baba’s folk cures with a blend of caution and curiosity. When a vision of Veronkha crosses his path in a mirror, he faints, and upon revival he becomes convinced that Veronkha is Iris, forgetting Iris’ death while the world around him carries on with its tangled histories.
The town’s people stage a sequence of battlefield tableaux, celebrating their valor in mock‑combat—an eerie prelude to real chaos. One moment of cruelty contrasts with Boles’ earlier impulse to protect: the moment when Danchuk, newly smitten with him, notices his medals and sees a chance to reaffirm social boundaries. Boles volunteers to discipline Geza with a harsh hand, whipping the boy when the father Jannings is too feeble to act, and in that moment Geza’s admiration for his captor grows. The community’s performances give way to a real combat, and Boles and Danchuk walk a field of corpses that appears to be a graveyard of the living as much as of the dead. Their solitary marker for a fallen soldier stands as a solemn beacon amid the carnage.
A key thread unfurls as Veronkha reappears, and Boles follows her in hopes of learning where she lives. Yet Veronkha enters the orbit of Philbin’s doctor and is hypnotized to recount a wedding night in which Philbin’s memory lapses and Veronkha discovers him with a front‑desk girl. Rumors swirl that Veronkha has a child, and Boles, still convinced Veronkha is Iris, misreads signs and imagines the child to be his own, projecting Iris’ memory onto the present through the fragile logic of his yearning. This mistaken belief sends him back to the billet with a desperate, fragile tenderness toward a baby that is, in fact, Danchuk’s.
A treasure map, paired with Veronkha’s marriage certificate to Philbin, becomes a guide on a dreamlike trek that ultimately leads nowhere, a ritual of chasing echoes rather than a path to real reunions. A new battle interrupts their pursuit; a flood of rabbits floods the trenches, the mammals fleeing Bolshevik forces and hinting at the war’s absurd ironies. Bolshevik intrusions erupt into the family home, menacing Geza while Jannings is brutally cut down; yet in a grim moment of supposed heroism, Jannings fights to protect what remains and appears to sacrifice himself in a way that makes Geza believe his father was the real hero. The violence marks Geza with a traumatic memory that seals his own death in the ensuing chaos.
Veronkha, meanwhile, renews her marriage to Philbin after annulling her previous union, and she and Philbin return to the Murmansk Hotel to relive a honeymoon that now becomes a contested memory. Boles trails them, and Veronkha, recognizing him, mistakes him for Philbin and confesses a feigned love in a bid to stir jealousy. When she discovers that Boles is not Philbin, she slides into amnesia again. In a stark moment of delusional hope, Boles tries to convince Veronkha that she is Iris, and Veronkha disappears into the shifting fog of memory. He follows the trail of the treasure map once more, and the couple’s fateful dance continues until Veronkha sees Philbin and remembers who she truly is, vehemently rejecting Boles and warning him away with deadly resolve.
Crushed by the turn of events, Boles returns to the front, his humanity battered by the repeated disappointments and false loves. He asks Danchuk to care for “his” baby should anything happen to him, even as Geza’s ghost appears to reunite with his father’s memory and to understand that his father died a hero—saving him. In a final, brutal surge, Boles joins a renewed assault and is wounded by a grenade bearing the grim inscription “Gott strafe Kanada” (God punish Canada). He staggered through the same treasure‑map route toward Veronkha’s wedding to Philbin, only to arrive at the same scene of ceremony—an endless loop in which desire, memory, and war blur into one cruel corridor of fate. With that sense of denouement, Boles leaves Archangel and makes the long return to Canada, a man destroyed by what he has seen and lost, a life and a love unfulfilled.
Throughout, the film threads a persistent meditation on how love can become a weapon against itself—how memory and longing braid with the brutality of war to create a narrative that refuses neat endings. The stark, dreamlike sequences, the haunting tableaux, and the mythic touchstones—the haunted grave markers, the sleep‑drunk trenches, the rabbits fleeing a collapsing world—work together to present a meditation on reconciliation, memory, and the costs of clinging to an idealized past. In this stark northern landscape, the human heart fights its own war just as surely as the soldiers do, and the price of holding on to Iris, Veronkha, or any dream becomes the true casualty of Archangel.
